The toybox originated as "the toy" or "the box",
a nifty Ultra that I got after several months of driving everyone
insane by talking about how I was going to get one very soon now. This
needs to be differentiated from
"my toy,"
a much smaller piece of equipment that stubbornly refuses to run UNIX,
about which I also talked incessantly before I purchased, and use now
with fair ubiquity.

The toybox is a place for us to have fun, to practice, and to do things
that we don't do at work.

On March 12, 2007 a touch of disk sadness led to toybox being moved to a PC running FreeBSD.

Hardware:
toybox was originally a
Ultra 1 Model 140 with 32 MB of memory and 1 GB of disk space,
upgraded to 128 (256?) MB of memory and 8 GB of disk.
The disk space is not quite enough, especially if we want to
have a news feed, so we are due to expand at some point. The memory
has been enough for our purposes, but it's always nice to have more.

It's now a PC with 2 GB of memory and 1/3 terabyte of disk. Probably too late for a news feed, though.

The performance has on the whole been very speedy, and will probably
be so for a while as we scale up.